So, one of my players has come up with a "cute" trick of using an Unseen Servant in combat.
Although it can't take Attack actions, it is not intangible and is immune to non-magical weapons. So he'll instruct it to - for example - stand behind an opponent in combat so that they, unaware that it is there, crash into it while attempting to maneuver away from charging party members. (This is commonly combined with flanking, having two party members flank an enemy and the Servant stand on one of the diagonals so that if the enemy attempts to Step out of the flank, there's a chance they pick wrong and fail due to hitting the servant.) Another trick is to wait for a ranged character to fire on their turn, then order the Servant to stand in front of them. If an enemy fires back unaware that the servant is there, they hit it instead, and it's immune to non-magical attacks.
I know these aren't really covered by the rules, but it's difficult to come up with sensible rulings, especially when many suggestions in this can be worked around. For example:
* Moving into an invisible creature's square doesn't collide with it because it can duck out of the way (suggested before): he can tell the servant not to duck out of the way.
* Ranged attacks don't hit the servant, it just gives cover: this allows cover checks to be used to detect invisible creatures, and it doesn't make sense that it provides "cover" when they don't know it's there.
* The servant is Hidden not Undetected: this is actually contradicted in the book. The Unseen Servant spell says that the servant "usually does not sneak and so is only Hidden", but the text of Invisible says that it is Undetected. Regardless, this is moot because it can be ordered to sneak.
* The PC would have to talk to the servant to tell it where to go and others could hear: this is unclear as commanding the servant is a part of sustaining the spell and doesn't have an auditory or linguistic tag. Even if it were the case, he can speak a language that enemies do not know (if you read the rules very pedantically, it just says that the servant 'understands their master' so he could just say flobbadobbliblobbleeb and be understood)
So I'm not quite sure, this is clearly not how the spell is intended to be used but it's difficult to come up with an explanation of why not that makes sense. Any suggestions?
